Principal Backend Engineer

A Principal Engineer at Monzo is a hands on engineering leadership (IC) position. As a Principal Engineer you ll:

Responsibilities

• Partner with and guide Engineering and Product Leaders to shape the technical and product direction of Monzo, providing company-shaping leadership across collectives (100+ engineers) and driving alignment with company-wide priorities, owning problems that materially impact Monzo s trajectory over the next 1-5 years.
• Remain hands-on in both coding and architecture where it adds the most leverage, especially in complex, high-risk or novel areas.
• Actively identifying high-leverage opportunities for Monzo and setting the direction of Engineering effort towards the most impactful outcomes.
• Mobilise teams across Monzo around high-impact problems, creating clarity, alignment and momentum, injecting urgency, or slowing things down to ensure safety and long-term sustainability.
• Lead and influence architectural direction for the most complex systems, driving consistency and reuse across domains, aligning local decisions with the broader system strategy.
• Set and uphold a high bar for technical excellence across Monzo, identifying and driving improvements in quality, reliability and scalability, and fostering a culture where engineers hold each other to that standard.
• Proactively mentor, sponsor and develop senior engineers and future leaders, multiplying your impact by enabling others to operate at a higher level.

What you ll be using/ What you ll be working on

• to write our application code (there s an excellent interactive Go tutorial)
• for most persistent data storage
• for our asynchronous message queue
• and to schedule and run our services
• for most of our production infrastructure and for most of our data infrastructure.
• for internal Web dashboards
• for storing our features along a variety of tools to train and deploy models.

9We d love to hear from you if...

• You have a track record of leading complex, high-impact systems and driving technical direction across multiple teams, domains or business areas
• You think in multi-year horizons to look around corners and build for the future, identifying opportunities before they present themselves
• You combine strong technical judgment with product and business awareness, making pragmatic trade-offs
• You ve worked on large scale backend, distributed or data-intensive systems
• You re comfortable operating in ambiguous problem spaces, helping teams define direction and execute
• You influence and align the most senior stakeholders across engineering, product and beyond
• You care about outcomes and impact, using data to guide decisions and to iterate
• You enjoy mentoring and raising the bar for other engineers